All People Matter

I follow baseball. I find it intellectually engaging without being stressful. I don’t follow any team and I don’t have strong feelings about most players. I follow the various teams and I enjoy the statistics.

But if there is a player I’ve not liked over the years, it is Nolan Ryan. Mr. Ryan always struck me as more about macho than about a team approach. He appeared to me always as a macho Texan Lone Ranger type.

“…I was Nolan Ryan’s pitching coach at Anaheim when he was there and I tried to get him to throw his curveball and his change to set up his fastball. But Nolan had such a big ego, he wanted to strike out people instead of win.”

Mr. Spahn is suggesting that if Mr. Ryan had developed a wider array of pitchs to throw instead of relying on his very fast fastball, that he would have been more successful. He would of had more tools to get batters out.

Mr. Ryan had 950 walks more than the number two out of 2,795 walks in comparsion to 900 more strikeouts over the runner-up out of 5,714 strikeouts.

Mr. Ryan could throw fast to get a strikeout, but he could not control his pitching to keep runners of first base with a walk.

One measure of a pitcher is his relative earned run average. This is how many runs are charged to a pitcher adjusted for the run scoring environment of the stadiums he pitched in and how the rest of the league is performing. 100 is average. Anything above 100 is above average.

Mr. Ryan’s number is 111. This ranks him as tied for 287th among all pitchers in this measure. That’s good, but nowhere close to great. The all-time leader among starting pitchers is Pedro Martinez who has a number of 154. If you follow baseball, you can study the list linked to at the top of this paragraph and see the multitude of pitchers not regarded nearly as well as Mr. Ryan who were, in fact, more effective at preventing runs scoring than was Mr. Ryan.

Mr. Ryan’s record as a pitcher was 324 wins and 292 defeats. He began his career in 1966 and retired after the 1993 season.

Much is made of the fact that Mr. Ryan pitched 7 no-hitters. No other pitcher has more than four. That’s fine–But Mr. Ryan started 773 games. So that is 7 out of 773 starts.

Mr. Ryan’s teammates and the fans of the teams he played on, would have better served if he had applied as much effort to true greatness as he did to showing off how fast he could throw. While Mr. Ryan was a generally effective pitcher over many innings pitched, what he is most know for are a selection freakshow statistics as much as or more than actually winning games.